Blowing pixels

Déplacements consists of 24 computer case fans forming a rectangle. Each fan is a “pixel�, its number of revolutions and the intensity of the light of its LED change according to the level of gray corresponding to the pixel of reference.

This screen of fans is controlled by a computer simulating a cellular automaton entitled The game of life (devised by John Horton Conway in 1970). In this mathematical model, each fan is a cell.

Displacement is a hijack of this object, a component of the computer becoming image. It is not a question of a physical “displacement� but of a movement, a flow.

Video. A work developed by Manuel Braun for his Diplôme Nationale Supérieure d’Arts Plastiques at the Aix-en-Provence School of Art.

Via abstract machine.

More fans in art: The Art of Breathing (Circulation); Circular Breathing, a personal breath recorder; Avantilator, a performance where 100 modified fans were playing the music along with the DJ; Rabbit Field, an infestation of inflatable rabbit-like forms; Blow-Up (image above) records, amplifies, and projects your breath into a room-sized field of wind; Breathe On Me, a space with fan/webcam devices on the walls. The fan/webcams are modified netcams such that Internet users can control the direction of the fan from the remote webcam view; Twilight, a breathing installation.